


Don't Call Me Daughter

by LinneaKou



Series: The Metal Heart [3]
Category: Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel 3490, The Avengers (2012), The Avengers - All Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always the Opposite Sex, Gen, Gender Discrimination, Gender Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-18
Updated: 2012-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-02 03:07:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinneaKou/pseuds/LinneaKou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Antonia Stark is not a little lady. You'd damn better not forget it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Call Me Daughter

**Author's Note:**

> Um, I accidentally girl!Tony *hangs head in shame*
> 
> Quite a few people are responsible for this, which has managed to TAKE OVER MY FREAKING LIFE. Liz, you fantastic beta, I hug you through the internet. A few people on Tumblr deserve mention. Joan as usual, because she demanded more. The folks over at Metal Heart on LJ, because seriously. And a few people who actually don't like the idea of Antonia Stark, for reminding me of why I started writing this character. My heartfelt thanks to gyzym for sparking Antonia's voice in my head again. Hi-ho, let's go.

At the age of four, Antonia Stark built her first circuit board. Her father, when she proudly presented it to him, made a face and looked away.

"Little girls shouldn't play with electronics," he'd muttered into his brandy.

 

Howard and Maria bought her dolls, pretty blonde Barbies that ended up on a shelf in Antonia's room and slowly gathered dust. The only time she touched the stupid things was when she accidentally knocked them all off the shelf, when one of her remote-controlled cars smacked into the wall. Luckily, neither of her parents was home. Only Jarvis, who helped her put them back up on the top.

"If I may, young miss?"

Antonia was already fiddling with the car again. "Hm?"

"Perhaps we should pack these lovely ladies away in the attic?" The elderly English man smiled, kneeling down so he could be at Antonia's eye-level. "You never seem to play with them."

"Why should I play with them? They're _boring_ ," Anton ia complained. "Mommy keeps bringing them home. I've got more of them under the bed and in the closet."

Jarvis huffed a small laugh. "I will go find an empty box, then."

Her parents never bought her another Barbie again.

 

At six years old, Antonia - now insisting on the nickname "Tony" - snuck out into the garage, which was where her father caught her fiddling with a motorcycle engine she'd built from scratch. He got real quiet, the way he did when he was really angry, and Tony shrank away.

"No more of this," Howard ordered. "Little girls shouldn't play with engine oil and grease."

 

Tony never quit, though. And Howard knew. And it infuriated him.

Eventually, though, Obadiah found out about it. He was tickled by the idea that Howard's pint-sized daughter was already assembling engines and had managed to create a vast assortment of electronics out of everyday household appliances. It was thanks to Obadiah's nudging and proddi ng that Howard eventually presented little Antonia Stark to the world, showing her off like a pet poodle that could jump through hoops.

At first, Tony liked it. With Obadiah's hand on her shoulder, she went on TV, the radio, got featured in magazines and newspapers, and started getting entered in shows. Started winning prizes. Started getting recognized. Howard smiled for the camera, went along with it, but Tony always managed to hear him complain to his wife about how embarrassing it was for his only child, his _daughter_ , parading around in oil-stained courderoys.

Then, Maria came up with a compromise. Then came the itchy dresses, the ugly skirts and sweaters and stupid floppy bow-headband things. Then Tony started hating it.

She kept entering shows, kept appearing on TV and the radio and the newspapers, but it wasn't really that fun anymore.

 

When she entered her adolescent years, Tony started picking up on exactly what other people thought of her. She was called "Princess Stark" to her face. She no longer was proud of how genius the world thought she was. She could see the playful indulgence in their eyes when they looked at her.

When she entered a national competition at the age of eleven, competing against high school teams, the judges and fellow contestants demanded proof that Tony had in fact assembled the working car engine she'd entered. She was forced to make another one right there in front of everyone, and her mother bemoaned the grease stains on the stupid off-white sweater all the way home. Tony didn't care about the damn sweater - the only thing she kept turning over in her mind was the sneer on the head judge's face when she'd told him, quite bluntly, "Well, who else do you think could have made it?"

Obadiah had applauded her spunk, which made her glow a little, but Howard had gotten that stony look on his face that meant he was going to go for the liquor cabinet that night.

That year was a bad one for Tony. Jarvis, the only member of the household that had really encouraged her, died three and a half months later. It was like a punch to the gut. Tony was already heading into high school, priming for an early entry into college. With Jarvis's death, Tony stopped interacting with her parents, barely paid attention to the new butler they hired, and started keeping unnatural hours down in her workshop. It had taken Tony a good two years, with much help and lobbying from Jarvis, to convince her father to let her have this one place for herself.

Computer-programming mania was in full swing. Tony found herself fascinated with arcade games - _Space Paranoids_ became her gateway into coding. She built herself a nice computer out of spare parts from both Macs and PC's - whatever parts didn't suit her needs or wants from either, she'd make her own from scraps. She was insanely proud of the moment that Franken-comp booted up for the first time, when the black screen lit up with strings of green gibberish scrolling across it. She devoured the coding, devoured the programming, devoured it all. She kept in the loop, even hacking into supposedly-secure databases and networks just for the challenge of it. She learned more from those night-long binges than she ever did from books or lectures she attended. She got good - so good that she got into MIT with barely any effort. Smart people started to take her seriously.

There weren't a lot of smart people around. James Rhodes was one of the few.

At first, he found it hard to believe that a foul-mouthed fifteen-year-old was seriously on the level with sophomore MIT students, but Rhodes wasn't an idiot. He learned when there was something to be taught, and one of his first lessons was "Tony Stark is not a little lady. Don't you dare spell her name with an 'i'."

Tony liked Rhodes. She liked him so much that she started calling him "Rhodey" and bummed bee rs off of him when she could get away with it - which was pretty much always, because Tony Stark was miles ahead of everyone around her. Rhodey saw that right away, but her professors didn't.

"Fuck this," she said one evening in the library. Rhodey was nose-deep in his physics notes, but he recognized the rough tone of her voice. He glanced up, and Tony was glaring at the desk in front of her like it had personally offended her. Rhodey just waited, and Tony took a deep breath and muttered, "Probably be better off by myself, stupid fuckers don't even think I can handle elementary physics, don't need 'em."

Rhodey shook his head. "They don't know what you're capable of," he said honestly. And they didn't. None of Tony's professors had been there the time she'd managed to design, assemble, and fly a miniature remote-controlled airplane over the nearby buildings, complete with a camera set to take a film roll's worth of pictures of whatever happened to be underneath i t. She'd done it for a lark - it was a nice day out, and she was bored. They'd managed to catch quite a few people doing a few illicit things, and they'd laughed themselves silly.

Tony Stark designed and built borderline spy equiptment for shits and giggles, yet her professors at MIT still treated her like a six-year-old who had wandered into a lecture hall.

Eventually, Rhodey had said something along the lines of "one day you'll show them" and Tony just latched onto it; it became her mantra. "I'll show you," she had muttered under her breath, as her advanced robotics professor ignored her in class. "I'll show you, you stupid ass."

At age seventeen, Tony graduated with honors from MIT. She also built a prototype robotic arm that outstripped her classmates' inferior creations by a mile. Rhodey had flashed her a smirk, and she'd beamed for the first time since the year Jarvis died.

Her mother showed up for Tony's graduation, along with Obadiah. Howard was nowhere to be found.

 

Tony's parents died when she was nineteen. She didn't cry at their funeral - how could she? They'd been nonentities, barely a part of her life, and for years it felt like she'd already been all alone in the world. She left New York as soon as she could, moving herself all the way across the country to Malibu, California. Stark Industries' main factory was out there, and Tony already had her eye set on taking the company once she was ready.

In the meantime Obie kept things running smoothly. He became the only person Tony could stand anymore - Rhodey was back in the Air Force and deployed in the Middle East, and while Tony didn't let on, she got _lonely_ sometimes. Sure, that almost-fling between them hadn't worked out, but Tony still cared about her best friend. The minute he was home on leave, she dragged him out for a night on the town. And that meant clubs.

The following week, Tony's club escapades were splashed all over pop magazines and newspapers. People wondered if Tony ought to take the company over after all, even if that was Howard's intent - it was in the will, sure. But did that entitle a brazen and openly nymphonic prodigy with loose morals to a powerful and dangerous weapons company? Did America really want a loose party girl running Stark Industries?

Well, it didn't matter what America wanted. Tony took the helm at age twenty-one. At first, the technological and military world was undecided on their opinion of her. Then, she started to take control.

It all began at a board meeting that started before Tony was ready. She'd waited until the windbag who'd talked over her ran out of steam, then smiled sweetly at him and told him in a no-nonsense voice that his input was no longer required, because he was no longer on the board. He'd sputtered at her, and she grinned at him, baring her perfect white teeth in a vicious smile. "Whose name is on the side of this buildin g, Mister Baxter?" She glared him down until he left, then turned to the rest of the board. The old men just stared at her. "Anyone else want to join Mister Baxter? No? All right, then we do things _my way_ from now on. Agreed, gentlemen?"

 

Stark Industries flourished. Tony Stark was hailed as a visionary, and featured on everything from _Maxim_ to _Rolling Stone_. She enjoyed the media fuss, but soon came to the conclusion that her current personal assistant was an idiot. That was when Virginia Potts, a lowly accountant, caught a small error that would have cost the company a pretty penny. Tony hired her on the spot, but under one condition: she needed a nickname.

It took Tony _ages_ to come up with a good one. Then Potts had come back from a vacation with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and Tony had snapped her fingers and shouted "Pepper!" And that was that.

 

At age twenty-three Tony manage d to hit a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. It started as a text-based program, responding to her prompts like a bot. Eventually, she figured out how to make it talk. She meticulously searched through her old tapes and painstakingly recreated a voice. When she was finished, she sat back and said, "Hello, JARVIS."

"Hello, Miss Stark," a smooth British-accented voice answered.

Tony smiled.

 

In all honesty, Tony should have figured it out. Obie never really berated her for getting into the public eye and having her naked ass splashed all over the budding internet. He'd made a face when the company's stocks suffered, but he never really told her to cut it out.

No one dared tell Tony to step down from _her_ company. They knew that she belonged right there at the top, even if most military officials didn't believe it. Even if the political analysts didn't think she was the best choice as the head of Stark Industries. Even if the first thing the everyday layperson thought of when faced with the words "Tony Stark" was "sex-obsessed billionaire" instead of "genius" - she's built weapons that futurists have only _dreamed of_ \- or _" _philanthropist__ " - the Maria Stark Foundation had helped dozens of promising, needy kids get the education they needed to carve out a name for themselves in the world.

Tony didn't notice anything at first. The company was doing great, she was in Vegas, and plenty of warm bodies were pressed around her - there was a very good chance her bed wouldn't be cold that night. Then Rhodey was at her shoulder, looking like someone shoved a stick up his ass - _further_ up his ass, because being in the Air Force had turned him into a hardass. He glared at her, and she had smiled sheepishly - Rhodey was one of three people in the world who could get that expression out of Tony Stark - and allowed herself to be lectured.

Then there was Miss Everhart. Oh , Tony had been through that song-and-dance before. How could she, the proud owner of a wonderful pair of tits and ovaries, possibly be involved in the business of war-profiteering? She goaded Christine Everhart, because that was always fun, and Christine Everhart was _very, very_ fun.

But Tony was ADHD, or so she told everyone, because who the hell cared? So Christine Everhart woke to JARVIS's matter-of-fact assessment of the day and Pepper's polite ushering out the door. Tony ignored the prominent alert that she should be on a plane to Afghanistan, instead focusing on the hot rod's engine in front of her.

Pepper, Rhodey, and Happy are all used to needing to herd Tony through the boring bits of life, and hours later Tony and Rhodey are flying across the world, heading to the hellhole known as the Middle East, and Tony couldn't help but feel like there really was not much more to life than _this_.

 

Tony wished she had never woken up in that cave.

Upon her awakening, Dr. Yinsen gave her a scarf and showed her how to wrap it around her head so that her hair and neck didn't show. Tony bit back the insults she wanted to sling, and shortly after her interrogation by the insurgents, her indignation to having to wear the thing transformed into relief that Yinsen thought so far ahead. But that kind of faded once the gravity of the situation hit her.

She was stuck in the middle of Afghanistan, in a cave system so complex that it would take the Air Force forever to find her. She was as good as dead, the only reason she _wasn't_ dead was the electromagnet stuck right between her breasts, hooked up to a car battery. And even if she managed to find a better power source, she'd probably get killed anyway - she wouldn't build a goddamn Jericho missile for these bastards.

Yinsen said something that made her change her mind. _Tony Stark is a futurist_ , she told herself. _A goddamn futurist, if nothing else._

She started to work. It was work, hard work, building that miniaturized arc reactor. But she felt a weight lift from her once that damned car battery was no longer a permanent fixture on her body. Even if she'd never feel the simple beating of her own heart ever again, she'd done it again. She saw how the men of the cell eyed her. She knew what they were thinking.

 _A woman_.

"I'll show you," she sneered at the door, the heavily guarded door. Yinsen looked up from his task, and Tony ignored him. Kept working. Because if she was going to show these bastards, she needed to get the suit done. Needed to get it _right_.

They'd only get one shot at this.

 

"How was the fun-vee?"

Tony didn't cry often. She'd cried for Edwin Jarvis, cried in private over private things, cried once in a while at a movie or a song that hit too close to home. She cried right then, into Rhodey's shoulder. He bundled her up and took her away, and she cried and wanted nothing more than to go home and mourn Yinsen and work on finding all of her weapons.

She didn't get home at first. They wanted information, they said. And she wasn't going to leave until she gave it to them.

She let them tend her wounds, let them patch her up. She gave her rehearsed story, told it over and over again. It was consistant, she knew that, but there were huge gaping holes in it, and she was too savvy to think that these trained military men wouldn't notice them. She'd worked with this sort of guy too often. They were as stubborn as bulldogs.

But she stuck to her story and kept asking for Pepper, for Obie, for anyone. She kept asking, and eventually Pepper started making things happen. Started pulling strings.

Things kept happening. Tony didn't dwell on them. Didn't think about them. She was gonna go crazy if she didn't get out of that damned hospital.

People kept trying to talk to her - trying to _shrink_ her. She didn't need a headshrinker. She needed to be home, with Pepper and Obie and JARVIS. She needed a goddamn American cheeseburger. She needed to get away from this stupid hospital with its disinfectant smells and its quiet beeping. She needed to get away from the salivating doctors and scientists who were _dying_ for the chance to poke at the device in her chest. She needed to not be faced with rape therapists every day - no one believed her when she said she hadn't been raped. Yinsen had protected her, she wanted to say, but no one would listen to her. Rhodey was being run ragged, having to choose between disobeying his superiors and helping his best friend or doing as he was told, which was supposedly the best thing for everyone. And everyone was getting sick of the situation at large.

Eventually Tony just lost it. Started throwing a tantrum right there in the interrogation room. Three days of this bullshit, and she couldn't take it anymore.

"I want to go _home_ ," she gritted out at the impassive general. "I am not a broken china doll. Stop treating me like one!"

She got on the first plane out the next day.

 

The press conference was, understandably, a disaster. Pepper's blank face of shock pretty much summed the entire fiasco up. Tony was ushered out, still guarding her thrumming chest, and when Obie showed up, it was the first time Tony had ever seen the man so unhappy. _Nothing_ Tony had ever done before had ever called up that reaction. Tony was actually freaked out.

Obie demanded what Stark Industries was going to do if their weapons division was shut down. Tony just stubbornly repeated, over and over, "Make things right."

"Make what things right?" Obie was almost hopping mad. He kept running his hands over his forehead, massaging his bald head with twitching fingers. "Tony, what are we going to do to keep Stark Industries in the black?"

His eyes kept flickering to her collar.

Obie's poker face sucked ass. "Who told you? Pepper or Rhodey?"

Obie wanted to see it. He flicked his gaze to the giant arc reactor powering the factory and back to the tiny, round device nestled on Tony's breastbone.

Tony didn't like that look.

 

She didn't like that look a few days later, when Obie showed up at her house with a pizza all the way from New York. It had been a shitty week; the redesign of the suit wasn't going as quickly as she'd wanted, and Rhodey had let her down. Pepper was the only bright spot, changing out the old arc reactor for the new and improved one, but other than that things weren't really progressing.

"Let me see what you're working on down there," Obie wheedled after telling Tony that the board had finally gotten sick of her games and locked her out.

"Good night, Obie."

 

So many icepacks and tweaks and fixes later, and Tony was flying over the water, reaching for the moon, plummeting towards the ground only to pull out at the last second.

It was exhilerating. _Nothing can hurt me now_ , she thought, screaming in joy.

 

Everhart cornered Tony at the ball and shoved the pictures of her damn weapons under Tony's nose.

"It's a town called Gulmira. Heard of it?"

 _Gulmira. It's a small town, but it is nice. My family is from there. And I will see them again, when we leave here_.

"When were these taken?" Tony demanded.

Everhart's face was a block of fucking ice. "Yesterday."

 

She landed and imagined the bastard with the gun to the man's head was totally pissing himself right then. And who wouldn't be, faced with what looked like a red-and-gold robot.

With lasers in the hands. Well, repulsors, to be accurate. Speaking of which, they were working perfectly. She knocked down four of them, got shot at and brushed it off, and turned to liberate the women and children in the van.

The insurgents all had managed to grab their human shields and were all yelling at her in their own languages, a roar of gibberish that she didn't bother to interpret. She merely lowered her hands, deactivated the repulsors, and activated the active sights on her HUD, prepping the closer-range shots.

She pucnhed through the wall to drag out the big bearded man who had grabbed the back of her head to shove her face under water. She grinned behind her faceplate as she lifted off.

"He's all yours."

 

Not even a tank could take down Tony Stark. She single-handedly took out the entire weapons depot, a one-woman army. The resulting explosion was very, _very_ satisfiying.

The aerial dogfight that followed immediately afterward was less so, but even so she appreciated Rhodey's failed attempt to call off the fighters on her tail. Still, Rhodey wasn't all the way on board yet, even though Tony was dying to show him the suit.

She did end up showing it to Pepper, who caught her in the middle of taking it off. "Let's face it," she deadpanned at Pepper's shocked expression. "This is _not_ the worst thing you've ever caught me doing."

 

She sent Pepper into Stark Industries, to find out where her weapons were going and who was sending them there. She wanted to cut out the guesswork. She didn't anticipate Obie sneaking into her house with one of those sonic paralyzing devices that had never made it to the military's hands. But as her body froze and her brain kicked into overdrive, Tony found herself stuck on one thought.

 _No Obie no, no, no, noooo_...

"Your father," Obie whispered to her, "He gave us the atomic bomb. Imagine if he had been as selfish as you are."

_No, not the arc reactor._

But there it was, it was out of her chest, no, he wouldn't disconnect it--

There was a click and Tony felt her heart starting to convulse, felt herself going into cardiac arrest. She didn't listen as Obie teased her, like he did back when she was a kid. She just sort of sank into a numb shock.

"I wish you hadn't involved Pepper in all of this," Obie remarked off-handedly. "I'd rather she lived."

Tony felt her heart rate speed up. Her eyes widened.

_I have to move--_

 

Rhodey found her collapsed on the floor of her lab, barely alive. The smashed glass around her didn't make sense at first, but it didn't matter. Rhodey helped Tony into a sitting position, reassuring her of Obadiah's impending arrest.

 _Five agents_.

"That's not enough," Tony gasped, scrambling to her feet.

 

It was a bastardization of her first suit, the one she used to escape from the cave. He managed to outfit it with more firepower than she put into her own, and as far as she could tell from her first glance, Obadiah hadn't put repulsors into the hands, but who knew what changes he'd made to the prototype?

Tony's suit isn't operating at full power. This fight was going to need to be won with logic and _not_ firepower.

"Face it, Tony!" Obadiah taunted her, throwing her around. "My suit is better, stronger, and more powerful!"

"I'll show you," she growled in response.

So she got him to chase her into the atmosphere. Got him to freeze in mid-air.

Then her suit's power cut out.

 

She groggily clambered to her feet. The suit's power was dangerously low - if she didn't get out and power down, that would overtax the arc reactor. And that was the only thing keeping her from keeling over right then and there.

Then Obadiah landed and the cat-and-mouse game began anew. Tony called up Pepper and barked off orders for her to follow. She'd given up on containing Obadiah. She had to go with the ultimate resolution that she had hoped to avoid entirely. Then she snuck up behind him and yanked out the wiring for his aiming system.

But she was close enough at this range to really take damage from Obadiah's guns. And he'd managed to get her helmet off.

She screamed for Pepper to overload the arc reactor. Pepper screamed back at her, but ultimately followed through. There was a brilliant flash of blue light, and Obadiah cried out in horror and pain before tumbling face-first into the core, which promtly blew sky-high.

And that was all Tony remembered.

 

Tony woke up the next day, and Pepper and Rhodey and Happy all jumped to their feet the minute she groaned and tried to sit up. The Department With The Ridiculously Long Name was handling the cleanup, Pepper informed her. She should just focus on recovery.

"Need to go home," Tony insisted, her throat dry and scratchy. "Need new reactor."

At first the staff of the hospital kind of refused. Agent Coulson eventually showed up and looked her over, eyebrows raised. "You sure you're not gonna keel over?"

Tony nodded, and Coulson sighed.

"Go ahead and take her home."

 

She sent everyone away the minute she settled back in. She gave them ten minutes to stop watching the house, but the minute JARVIS alerted her to their departures, she slunk down to her lab. _The suit_ , she thought. _Need to rebuild it. Need to fix it._

_Need it._

 

She got all of her tantrums out in a grand total of five hours. She got drunk, had JARVIS cut off all lines of communication so she didn't fuck everything up, and cried. Cursed Stane to hell and back. Cursed her _father_ for leaving her in the hands of a heartless bastard who saw her as a fucking chesspiece.

A fucking doll.

Tony Stark was _no doll_ , damn it.

"I'll show you," she promised, her voice rough and sore and hurting. "I'll show all of you."

 

She left off fixing the suit when Pepper came to collect her for the press conference. She let Pepper fix her face, cover up the cuts and bruises. She managed to pull herself together, look respectable. She let Coulson break down the cover story.

A bodyguard. This "Iron Man" was her bodyguard. What the fuck was wrong with everyone? Why did everyone assume it was a _man_ in there? Did no one really know Tony Stark?

But Pepper looked at her with those big green eyes of hers and pulled her aside. "I know you, Tony," she said quietly. "I've been working for you long enough to know that you're going to go out there and blow the whole thing wide open. But did it occur to you that it won't be affecting just _you_ if you do?"

Tony stared at the redhead and gulped. "I'll stick to the cover."

Because she was right. Pepper was always right.

 

She stuck to it. But that didn't stop the government from trying to butt in and seize the suit.

When she refused to back down, they wanted to know the identity of the bodyguard. She just glared, then said quite plainly, "Iron Man signed a contract that stated that his identity would be kept private so he could continue living his civilian life. You want Iron Man? _You can't have him_."

She didn't feel bad about lying to the military. She didn't feel bad about lying to the asshat senator, who gave her this indulgent look that _pissed her the fuck off_ , because that was the smile that they'd given her back when she was ten and whooping the asses of robotic students twice her age. _Oh, you're so cute, honey. You think you can deny us for much longer?_

Yeah, she could.

 _I'll show you_ , she promised, plastering a winning smile on her face as Senator Stern sneered down at her.

 

She was dying. It didn't take long for the palladium to start poisoning her blood. She had known it would happen. She took a deep breath, stayed calm, and started trying to fix the problem.

 

Five months later, and she was running out of solutions. So Tony accepted the inevitable. She started preparing.

 

The Stark Expo was a huge success. People arrived from all over the world, crowding at the chance to witness history in the making (and maybe get Iron Man's autograph in the meantime.) Tony put up with it for all of a day and a half, then retreated back to Malibu to continue working on her newest suit. And, when she was feeling particularly hopeful, maybe work on finding a new fuel source for the glorified pacemaker that was slowly killing her.

Pepper followed her home, berating her for disappearing. Tony decided that fuck it, get it over with. She gave the company to Pepper.

Better Pepper than her, really.

 

It was a routine peacekeeping mission - about as routine as it can get - and Tony was feeling pretty good about herself. She had Pepper on the phone, chattering away as she hovered over the surrendering insurgents that were being dragged away by UN troops.

"And so I was thinking, maybe we could hit Morocco, check out the--"

There was a loud _thwipp_ noise and then the next thing Tony knew, she was on the ground. She looked up at the man advancing towards her, cracking nasty-looking whips that were surging with some kind of energy. And on his chest--

 _Oh god fuck no_.

"Gonna have to call you back," she spat out, and hung up on Pepper before her spotty communications unit could do it for her.

Ten minutes later, when the UN guys had finally gotten brave enough to come close, after Tony ripped out the man's home-made arc reactor and crushed it in her palm, Tony looked up at the interloper as he was dragged away.

He spat out blood, laughed a maniac's dying laugh. "You tell Stark she _lost_ ," he taunts her in a heavy Russian accent. "You _lose_ , Stark!"

 

Tony insisted on interrogating the prisoner. She sat there for a good five minutes in silence. The man sat with his back to her, picking at his dirty nails. He was covered in scars and tattoos, and he was fucking _huge_. Tony kept one of her handheld weapons up her sleeve, but the guy didn't seem that interested in talking to her after her first spurt of technobabble. She always tended to babble when uncomfortable.

Eventually it got ridiculous and she gave it up. She turned to leave and the man turned and smirked at her.

"Hey Stark. Palladium in the chest... painful way to die."

 

She got back to the U.S. and found the military waiting for her on her doorstep. She managed to conceal her suit and keep her bruises hidden, but Rhodey was waiting for her in her living room.

"They want the suits," Rhodey told her.

God _damn it_ , she didn't need that right at that second. "I said no."

"They don't care. Someone else out there had the technology when you said they wouldn't." Rhodey was clearly uncomfortable, just like he'd been in the hospital after Afghanistan.

"I'm looking into it," Tony snapped. She was. The guy's name was Vanko - but it didn't mean anything, really. He'd died in a freak accident shortly after she left, and as far as she knew, she'd destroyed his only arc reactor - those things were hard enough to make as it was.

"Tony, they sent me in here to get what they wanted."

Tony froze. She'd planned on Rhodey showing up eventually, planned on it. She'd even refitted the Mk. II suit to fit him, as opposed to her five-foot-five frame. But this was _too much, too soon_.

"Tell them to go fuck themselves," she growled.

"I can't leave without the suits, Tony."

"I'm not giving them up, Rhodey." But the words tasted like sand in her mouth. She was dying. She had nothing else... _no one_ else. And if there was one person in the world that she wanted to end up with her suits, it was Rhodey. Not the U.S. military. Rhodey.

But not then. Not until after she'd run out of options.

 

But the Air Force ended up with the Mk. II suit anyway. It came down to a tantrum that Tony had had brewing for a while. Natalie Rushman certainly hadn't helped, showing up like she was Pepper's personal courier... as if Pepper Potts was too fucking busy to come talk to Tony herself. And Tony had gotten angry, and called Pepper out on the phone and blown up at her. And then things had spiraled out of control, and Tony had ended up in her suit, and Rhodey had gotten into his, and they were destroying her house, and she hoped for a split second that maybe, just maybe, it would be Rhodey finishing her off. She could accept that. Better than dying slowly of blood poisoning.

But Rhodey, curse him and his stupid fucking loyalty, left her alone in the ruins of her house. And that was it, Tony had successfully driven away everyone she cared about.

 

Nick Fury was a no-nonsense man with an eyepatch and a serious case of attitude. He'd looked her up and down and asked, almost blandly, "Bad day?"

So this was Coulson's superior. No wonder the guy was such a hardass. And Tony really should not have been surprised that Miss Rushman - whoops, _Agent Romanov_ \- worked for him, too. And she didn't appreciate the stupid redheaded double-crosser jabbing her in the neck with a syringe, even if it helped take the edge off the poisoning.

Once Tony wasn't dying as quickly as she had been five minutes ago, Fury ripped into her, and Tony didn't need that, fuck it all. So she snapped back.

"I can't fix this one! I've tried, and nothing worked."

"Try _harder_ ," Fury suggested, glaring.

 

"Thanks, Dad," Tony muttered, surveying the blue hologram of the new element's atom. She took another shot from her whiskey, winced at the burn. "You sucked as a father, but you're a helluva scientist. Asshole."

 

As she was cleaning up the damage she'd managed to do when she had synthesized the new element, her phone rang.

"Ooh, goody, phone priveledges reinstated." She punched the answer button and flopped down in her rolly-chair. "Coulson! How's the land of enchantment?"

The answering voice was _not_ Coulson. "Hey, Tony. Long time."

 _Holy hell._ She jerked out of her seat, heart pounding. "You sound pretty sprightly for a dead guy."

"You too," Vanko laughed in response.

Tony muted the call and ordered JARVIS to trace it.

"It took me long time to see through mask, Tony. Kind of brave of you, putting on armor and putting life on the line to get rid of weapons you didn't sell. But six months of new direction is not enough to make up for forty years of deception and dishonesty. What your father did to _my_ father over forty years, I will do to you in forty _minutes_."

Tony didn't answer.

"Your friends Potts and Rhodes are at Stark Expo, yes? They are all you have left, yes?" Vanko laughed again. "Being alone sucks, Tony."

The line went dead.

"JARVIS, assemble the suit." She scrambled for the new reactor, yanking out the old one and ignoring the fluttery feeling in her chest as she clicked the new one in.

"Miss, there are still tests--"

" _I don't want ot hear it, JARVIS_!"

It tasted like coconut. And metal.

 

Rhodey had taken the Mk. II to Justing-fucking-Hammer. And as Hammer was wont to do, he'd merely attached more guns and added more bulk to a suit that was meant to be lightweight and efficient. Of course the military would take that. The military was made of fucking imbiciles.

Unfortunately, as Tony quickly found out, Hammer had gotten to Vanko, too. And Vanko had gotten to Rhodey's suit.

Tony managed to get through to Agent Romanov, ordered her to get Pepper to safety. She didn't want to give Vanko another clear target. Instead, she let Rhodey's suit - along with a fuckton of droids - chase her through the sky above the Expo. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents had already been dispatched to clear the area, and Rhodey was barking information to her over the comm link, trying to give her a leg up. She managed to out maneuver them for a while, managed to get most of the Hammeroids blown up, but Rhodey's suit was a combination of her ingenuity, Vanko's ruthlessness, and Hammer's idiotic love of big guns. When Agent Romanov managed to reboot Rhodey's suit in the nick of time, she caught herself nearly thanking the double - triple?? - agent.

"No problem, Miss Stark," Romanov had laughed.

Then the Hammeroids started raining down on them. Rhodey and Tony managed to work together, fitting flawlessly together, and for once Tony saw what it would have been like if they'd ended up working out. It was perfect, as they reacted to the little cues and calls, and Tony felt irrationally proud of it.

Then Vanko landed in _his_ very own suit.

"This is gonna suck, isn't it?" Rhodey deadpanned, which startled a laugh out of Tony. Then they began the dance anew.

 

"I told you, I don't want to be a part of your super-secret boy band," Tony groused at Fury, who merely watched her with the most deadpanned deadpan she'd ever seen.

"Oh, we weren't going to ask _you_. Iron Man is the perfect candidate for the Avengers Initiative. But _you_ on the other hand..."

"Let me guess," Tony challenged, slamming her palms down on the table. "Because I'm a puny lady, because I have tits and ovaries and a _uterus_ , because I have hormones and a cycle and all that shit, I'm not good enough?"

Fury raised an eyebow. "No. Your being a woman has nothing to do with it. Your irrational and selfish behavior does."

He shoved Agent Romanov's report at her. Tony read it through and interjected with her own comments. But she couldn't deny what she read.

"You can be a part of the Initiative, but we'd rather you helped out as a consultant." Fury looked at her over the desk, drumming his fingers on the scarred wood. "And of course, stayed on hand to take care of the Iron Man suit."

Tony saw what he was offering, and thought about it. Then, she closed her eyes and nodded. "All right."

 

She got a special pleasure from watching that run-down watering hole get demolished. Pepper handed her a coffee, and muttered something about enjoying the destruction a little too much.

Tony smirked. Pissing off Ross had been way too much fun. Maybe she'd end up liking this Consultant gig after all.

 

Steve Rogers started off as an asshole. Then, a grudgingly good teammate. Then, a pretty cool guy. Then, a pretty nice guy. Then, a _very hot piece of man flesh get in my bed_.

Tony was a little surprised when he bought her those earrings for Christmas. _Pepper helped him_ , she thought, turning them over in her palm. She looked up at him, with his stupid perfect face and his ridiculous, puppy-dog happy expression.

She swore to never take them out.

 

She was even more surprised when Steve kissed her on New Years Eve. Awfully foward of him. But she _liked_ it.

 

When she couldn't do it - when she couldn't stand the idea of Steve seeing the arc reactor - she felt awful. More awful than she had ever before in her _life_. But she'd also been immensely grateful when Steve backed down and left her alone.

She stared at the arc reactor in the mirror, watching it just glow and hum in her chest. She wondered if Steve thought it was _wrong_ the same way she did.

Fifteen minutes ago, Pepper had managed to get into the lab in the meantime, and just stood there glaring at her down at her as she worked. "Steve's really tore up over this, you know."

Tony didn't answer.

"He didn't mean to hurt you."

"He didn't hurt me," Tony replied, her voice only shaking a little.

Pepper sighed, and for the first time in a long time, put her arms around Tony's shoulders. "I know," she whispered.

Tony took a deep, shuddering breath. "I hate this thing, even if it's keeping me alive."

"I know." Pepper said again, and Tony closed her eyes.

They stood there in silence, then Tony wiggled out of Pepper's embrace. "You gotta help me. I can't get ready by myself."

Pepper's eyes sparkled. "You're going?"

"Can't leave Steve all alone to fend for himself. The harpies will tear him to pieces." Tony took off for the shower, leaving Pepper to laugh herself silly.

Ten minutes later and she was staring at herself and wondering if maybe, just maybe, she could make this into something.

 

The problem with being Steve's... _whatever_ they were... was the fact that he tended to be a little _overprotective_ of her. Tony had been good about taking it slow and dealing with her triggers. And she knew Steve had issues of his own. But there was a line to be drawn, and she drew it at him going out of his way to protect her in the heat of battle.

Steve was confused, adorably so, when she refused to talk to him on the Quinjet. She kept silent when she didn't want to say anything she'd regret - she'd learned that lesson way back in the beginning. Steve was just learning to read the signs. He knew that Tony was upset.

"What did I do now?" he eventually asked, and Tony sighed. When she didn't answer, he pressed on. "Look, I'm terrible with women. You know that. At least tell me what I can fix?"

"Steve," Tony finally said, keeping her voice even. "You do know that I wear a suit of armor so that I don't die."

Steve blinked. "Yeah?"

"I'm not a china doll, Steve." She glared out the window at the sky. The suit _did_ get damaged in the fight they were coming home from, but that was easily fixed.

Steve shakes his head. "I don't get it."

"Steve, _goddamn it_ , I am not a china doll! Yeah, I'm a girl. I'm also a genius that built that suit in a cave with a box of scraps, in case you forgot. I do my own maitenence. I've nearly died more times than I care to count, and yet _here I am_ , alive and well! Or did everyone in the world forget that I _am_ Iron Man and was _waaaaaaay_ before the world found out?"

They sat there in silence for a few minutes, then Steve said, softly, "I know all of that. And I never forget."

"Then what the _hell_ is your problem?"

Steve scrubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. "You... I don't--"

Tony made a face and glared at the Quinjet's controls.

"You remind me of Peggy," Steve finally said.

Tony's eyes widened. She swiveled her head to stare at him.

"No, really, you do!" Steve's smiling now. "Tough, smart, and practical. And beautiful. And she got angry at me the first time I saved her life. Pulled her out of the way of a car trying to run her down. She was going for a headshot. I wasn't interested in seeing the first dame to ever show interest in me ending up ground into the street. She forgave me, I think."

Tony raised an eyebrow. "You think?"

"She kissed me. I think that means she forgave me." Steve gave her that adorable little grin, and Tony felt her anger melting away.

 _God damn you and your stupid perfect face_.

"Thing is," Steve went on, the grin fading. "I... missed my chance with her. And now..."

Oh.

_Oh._

Tony mentally cursed at herself. Of course. She'd already had this meltdown, after the big reveal and the fight with Doom. "Sorry," she muttered.

"It's... it's _not_ okay," Steve admitted. "But I'd like to keep you around. You know, so I--" He swallowed, suddenly going red.

Tony grinned. "Oh, I know." She shrugged. "Pepper will probably appreciate the help in keeping me alive, of course. And I guess you're right. But if you put yourself in danger to save me _one more time_ , then goddamn it Rogers, there's going to be hell to pay. I propose a compromise."

"A compromise?" Steve repeated.

"Yeah." Tony wagged her finger at him, and he grinned at her.

 

She was obscenely proud when Steve defended her on national TV, because what girl wouldn't be proud when her man stuck up for her to one of the biggest, loudest, most obnoxious assholes in journalism. Fox News was probably reeling from having _Captain Fucking America_ call them out on their sexist bullshit. They'd probably be reeling for a while.

"JARVIS, I'm going to need that saved and backed up. And plastered all over the internet in ten minutes."

"Of course, Miss."

"Don't call me that."

**Author's Note:**

> Song title comes from the similarly-titled song by Pearl Jam. Not really much else to say, the song has little to do with the actual content of the story.
> 
> And yes, I threw in that reference to TRON because I'm a geek and because YOU ALL KNOW THAT CROSSOVER WOULD BE EPIC. Goodnight!


End file.
